Dave Kelly, director of CSULB’s Advanced Media Production Office, poses with the WAVE Award he and his crew received for their production of the documentary “Panama Canal Expansion: The Battle for Jobs and Cargo.”

Dave Kelly, director of Advanced Media Production (AMP) at Cal State Long Beach (CSULB), and his staff have won a Western Access Video Excellence (WAVE) Award for a documentary they produced titled “Panama Canal Expansion: The Battle for Jobs and Cargo.”

A historically-based documentary, the 19-minute “Panama Canal Expansion” video also focused on the canal’s current construction effort and the potential impact it will have on global trade and shipping routes.

The WAVE Awards are sponsored by the Alliance for Community Media (ACM), a national organization of community, educational, and governmental TV producers. The ACM Western Region holds an annual conference with the awards competition, which includes participants from six states—California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado and Hawaii.

Eligibility requirements include airing the program on a local community cable channel, which the Panama documentary met by airing on Beach TV, the CSULB 24/7 local cable channel.

The program was submitted by CSULB for consideration in the category of “documentary events” and then became nominated as a finalist for the ACM Western Region awards presentation in San Jose. Kelly was on hand to accept the award as the winners were announced.

Kelly, who has been at CSULB for 27 years, has headed production for about a dozen mini-documentaries and three full-length pieces, most recently the one-hour documentary titled “Long Days Working Hard: Long Beach During World War II.”

Along with Kelly, who was the documentary’s writer, producer and narrator, AMP’s Dave Ohl served as the video photographer, post-production editor and graphics effects animator. Craig Walker conducted field recording and image digitization.

The documentary was initially prepared for and presented at CSULB’s Center for International Trade and Transportation (CITT) Point/Counterpoint event at the Carpenter Center in October 2010. The event included a discussion by experts in global trade and logistics about the impact of Panama Canal expansion. Panamanian construction efforts are scheduled to be completed in 2014, the canal’s 100-year anniversary.

“CITT wanted a video to compliment that event and to help frame the issues for the discussion that followed,” said Kelly, “but the documentary is not just about the Panama Canal; it’s also about all the various trade routes that are in development now across the world.”

“Panama Canal Expansion: The Battle for Jobs and Cargo,” presents a historical chronology of the quest to find a central waterway connecting the eastern and western hemispheres, which resulted in the canal opening at the beginning of World War I. Now, nearly 100 years later, the Panamanian people voted to fund the expansion of the canal, allowing a third set of locks to be constructed. The new locks will more than double the size of ships and the number of containers which can pass through the channel.

“What was interesting about this particular documentary was that we were able to explore and examine the history of the Panama Canal,” Kelly pointed out. “The first several minutes are about the historical aspect of the canal and how important it was at the time it opened. Then the narrative transitions from that era into what is occurring today and what will happen with the ongoing efforts to add the third set of locks. We were able to assess the impact the expanded canal will have on trade routes around the world and at all the competing ports in the United States.”